Archive for the ‘.org’ Category

Another Saturday here already! For all of you celebrating Halloween Monday with your families or this weekend at parties with your friends have fun and be careful!

The .ME Premium auction is underway and got off to a pretty quick start. There are still many great .ME names without any opening bids including Tourism.me, Services.me, Wealth.me, Culture.me, Tablet.me, Realty.me and many more. The highest bid right now is shared by top.me and RealEstate.me which are both currently at $1,550. This auction is ending Thursday, Nov. 3rd.

Web.com finalized the acquisition of NetworkSolutions.com this week. They now own NetSol as well as Register.com, the combination of those two registrars gives Web.com control over an additional 8.4 million domain names (according to webhosting.info). Web.com has recently been mass advertising their cheap web design and hosting options for businesses via TV commercials. According to a press release, Web.com paid NetSol Holdings LLC (NetworkSolutions.com parent company) $405 million in cash and 18 million shares of Web.com common stock. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the Network Solutions and Register.com brands, obviously Web.com is the shorter and more memorable name for new/non domainer customers. Even with more than 8.4 million domains housed with Web.com, this is still only a fraction GoDaddy.com’s nearly 40 million registered domains.

My first article of a four part series on acquiring domain names was published this week at iGoldRush.com. This first article focuses on strategy for hand registering domain names. The series I am writing is geared more towards new domain investors, which works out great for iGoldRush as it really is a go to site for those learning the ropes in the domaining world. iGoldRush.com is the most comprehensive domain name guide and news resource on the Internet.

DomainShane.com reported this week that the domain name 55.com was sold earlier this year for $2.3 million dollars via the 4.cn domain marketplace. Shane has been talking about the Chinese domain market for over a year now and has really sparked interest by many sellers in the 4.cn forum. Numeric domain names are very popular amongst the Chinese and it seems many of the highest numeric domain sales are coming from China. The Chinese domain market is only getting stronger and is worth paying attention to if you are a serious domain seller. According to DNJournal.com 11.com just sold for $525k through the MediaOptions.com newsletter, the buyer a Chinese company.

At the request of many domain registrars, ICM Registry has extended the Sunrise Period for .XXX domain names. At the end of the week ICM estimated they received nearly 72,000 applications with many more coming in and yet to be processed. Elliot Silver predicts that by Monday there will be over 100,000 applications.

The complete list of results of the 2011 TRAFFIC Auction were posted yesterday at RicksBlog.com. Rick also just announced this morning that they will be adding an award for domain “broker of the year” to the TRAFFIC 2012 awards.

According to an article on BendBulletin.com, four political campaigns have spent just over $21,000 on domain registrations for the 2012 presidential race. The bulletin article studied the finance reports of the Obama, Romney, Pawlenty, Perry and Paul campaigns. Here’s how it broke down:

Romney $12,097

Obama $8,065

Pawlenty $668

Paul $208

Perry $0

The article references GoDaddy.com every time it mentions a where a candidate registers domain names. I don’t know if all of these candidates names are maintained by GoDaddy but the authors of the article probably don’t even know what the word ‘registrar’ means. It’s kind of like when someone is in a supermarket looking for tissue paper they ask the store employees “Where’s the Kleenex?”.

According to the Bend Bulletin article researchers, the Romney campaign spent an additional $398 on two DomainTools.com subscriptions. Nice plug for DomainTools there.

Parts of the Bulletin article try to connect some of the registrations by one campaign to domains that include names of other politicians by comparing registration dates and reported transaction histories. Of course, the majority of these domains are registered under privacy as pointed out by the authors. Among names mentioned that were recently registered: stickittorick.com, buryperry.com, therealrickperry.net, christiansagainsperry.com, americansagainstperry.com, christians4perry.com. Hmm, since the Perry campaign isn’t buying up Perry related names and Romney denies it, who is? Who cares?

When asked why the Rick Perry campaign is not buying domain names for their candidate the Perry campaign spokesman said:

“The public is more interested in how the candidates can create jobs and improve the economy, not how many domain names you can rack up. We’re not running for student body council here. This is for president of the United States.”

NamePros.com announced yesterday that it will be holding another live auction in it’s chat room next month on November 20th. This will be the third live auction at NamePros this year. Unlike past NP auctions, next month’s is reserved for short names only. Submissions accepted will be limited to LLL, CCC or LLLL names in the .COM extension and the submission period will end nine days before the auction on November 11th.

Glad to see another live auction at NP, the chat room style auctions are always fun to watch and participate in. I think the short name themed auction should work well, there is plenty of inventory of short names owned by NamePros members and I will bet that this auction sees more bidding action than previous auctions on NP this year.

The next live auction is scheduled for November 20th @ 2PM CSTTheme: LLL, LLLL, CCC .COM Only! -No exceptions!
Submit Names: October 17th – November 11th

The NamePros Live Auction is held once monthly and features domains for sale in a dynamic online event hosted by a live auctioneer team. The final value fee for sellers is a flat $5 payable after a successful transaction.

Your current account level allows up to 2 submissions per auction. NamePros Supporters and Business Members can list up to 8 domains. Click here to upgrade your account.

The following types of domains may not be sold at live auction:

Explicit adult names

Sub-domains or non-standard domains

Domains expiring in less than 30 days, unless renewal is to be included.

IDN domain names are permitted if they are identified as IDN with the punycode in the description.

…

A reserve price is required for all auction lots. If winning bid meets or exceeds your reserve price, it is considered a binding contract that is expected to be completed within seven (7) days of the live auction event.

Using a reasonable reserve price is strongly recommended. YOUR RESERVE PRICE WILL BE VISIBLE.

Auction fees: There is no fee to list your domain in the NamePros Auction. If your domain sells, there is a $5 final value fee due upon successful completion of your transaction. If your domain does not sell there is no fee. There is no fee if your domain sells for less than $10.

The minimum reserve price is $5. Reserves of $5 are an excellent way to encourage bidding and qualify your domain for live auction, but be mindful that the final auction results will be binding.

What happens after you submit your name? Your auction lot is immediately entered into our silent auction. The silent auction is a queue of domains that allows interested buyers to bid prior to the live auction. A domain becomes eligible for the next live auction when it receives a verified bid within 50% of the seller’s reserve. Final value fee is due seven days after successful live auction sale and must be paid before participating in future events. Buyers and sellers that do not complete deals will receive negative feedback and be barred from future participation.

Once names start filling up the auction queue, you can use these links to view the silent and live auction queues:

Earlier this week it was reported that National A-1 sold the domain name Poker.org via Sedo brokerage for $1 million USD. This shatters the highest ever .org sale which was previously $198,000 for the domain engineering.org. The purchaser, PokerCompany.com said this in a press release: “Poker.org is an integral part of our growth strategy, and will provide great dividends now and into the future..” PokerCompany.com is a online poker super affiliate, which means they work with the biggest gaming sites online, driving them thousands of new real money players each month through their gaming portals. PokerCompany also has several category killers domain names like blackjack.org, craps.net, rakeback.org and loyalty.net. Each of these sites are tailored to drive affiliate leads to one of the gaming sites that advertise with PokerCompany. Once the transfer is complete and PokerCompany.com is in possession of poker.org I am almost expecting to see a cookie cutter site on it that looks just like blackjack.org and craps.net.

Whether Poker.org will pay for itself and convert millions of dollars of affiliate revenue for PokerCompany.com is a question we will probably never know the answer to. Do I think it was a good acquisition for PokerCompany.com? Not really, mostly because I think they could have spent a tenth of that on a great .com with targeted traffic, etc. Unless they are going to do some major rebranding around this new acquisition the purchase price was hefty, but I am very happy for the implications and press it brings the domain sector. Word of this sale being talked about in almost every major poker publication, this is good press for the domain industry for two reasons. First, obviously the press sheds more light on domain names and extensions other than .com being a valuable asset. Secondly, most poker players are entrepreneurs at heart. I know several professional poker players that are into domaining and I think that we will see more poker players find interest in domain investing when they hear of this kind of sale.

I was out running errands this morning and somehow found myself browsing the fishing supplies at my local retailer. As I stared at a pre organized kit of lures I notice a big sticker with the domain name TakeMeFishing.org on it.

This is a very nice example of how the Recreational Boat and Fishing Foundation (rbff.org) utilizes a nice ‘call to action’ domain name in their niche. Even though it appears that the website (and box of lures) is aimed at kids, I was immediately drawn to the domain and visited the site from my phone to see if it was a site launched by Rapala since that was the brand of lure kit the sticker was on.

Using a strong call to action name is a clever way to drive traffic to your website. Online shoppers may be more likely to recall and visit a website titled “Take me Fishing’ than they would company name (.com/net/org). Nice job RBFF! I think TakeMeFishing.org is an exceptional use of a domain name as a point of entry to your organization.